Vacancy - Review

Director: Nimrod Antal
Writer: Mark L. Smith
Starring: Luke Wilson/Kate Beckinsale
Runtime: 80 minutes

In Vacancy, Luke Wilson takes a turn away from comedy to try his hand in a horror thriller. The result is a so-so homage to Psycho. Or maybe The Ring. Or perhaps Saw.

Vacancy starts out with Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale driving on a mountain road. They are a husband and wife, and they hate each other. It is night. The road is deserted. They have a map, but they can’t read it properly. They have cell phones, but there’s no signal. They spend a few minutes digging insults at each other as the car winds its way through the mountains. They realize they are lost. Then their car breaks down. The only piece of civilization is a deserted motel with a gas station. What to do?

If you’ve seen enough horror films, you’ll now be screaming "Derivative!" at the top of your lungs. You’d be correct. Yet you also have to feel sorry for the filmmakers.

Horror movies are getting harder and harder to create. GPS systems are making the whole ‘wrong turn’ idea more difficult. Cell phones mean that 911 is only three buttons away. Then there’s the fact that 300 million people live in the US. Just how many empty roads are left for crazy people to hide out in?

As a filmmaker, all you can do is toss it against the wall and hope it sticks: empty road means crazy people means no signal on your cell phone. On with the movie.

Beckinsale and Wilson check into the hotel for the night. The manager is a skinny, creepy fellow, straight out of central casting. He and his motel are such a ripoff of Norman Bates and his establishment that the director throws in the towel and makes it a homage: the motel’s lobby is a replica of Psycho’s, and there’s bird statues on the desk beside the bell, another subtle nod to Norman Bates.

When they check into their motel room, Beckinsale and Wilson are disgusted by the place, but decide to make the best of it. Wilson finds some old VHS tapes beside the TV. He puts one in. It’s a horror scene, with a man and a woman being attacked by a couple of masked men. Wilson puts in another tape. Same thing, people being attacked and stabbed to death. But then Wilson notices that the room in the video tape is the same as the room he is in right now. And when there’s a loud knock on the door, he realizes they are in deep trouble.

I was intrigued. Yes, I’d recently seen most of this (the video in The Ring, the trapped duo in Saw), but I liked the size of Vacancy. Not the length; modern horror films rarely run more than 95 minutes unless they involve an exorcism. In Vacancy, 20 minutes had gone by and we’d only met a few characters. I liked that, because it meant that there might be some solid writing.

With more characters comes more excuses to cheat. If someone’s in trouble, one of a half-dozen people can rush in to save the day in the nick of time. But when the amount of characters are limited, so is the writer’s ability to cheat the audience with a dumb coincidence.

Unfortunately, scribe Mark Smith couldn’t make it the distance. He does a very good job keeping us in the dark for a while, but then he exposes the reason behind these snuff films too early. From then on it is regular run-away-hide-run-away-hide fare, and it's tedious. It is amazing how horror writers and directors don’t trust their instincts, and instead reach for the screenplay manual. In that manual, it says that the lead characters must meet their adversary face to face at the exact mid-point of the movie.

Why, oh why, do they continue to do this? In Vacancy, the knocking on the door, the empty parking lot, the flickering lights, the terrifying videos, all of these things turn the screws. Then the killers are exposed and the suspense is dead. The fear of the unknown is so much more powerful than a man with a knife, and it sickens me when filmmakers have a good thing going and then pull out the cliches.

Luke Wilson does a good job with the role. It takes a few minutes to get his comedic films out of your head, but after that, it’s pretty smooth sailing. Beckinsale is great, but takes a loss when things get physical. The writer turns her into the fraidy-cat girl, and the director lets her act like it, which is a shame.

I know what they were going for. Hollywood is in love with the idea of ‘character arc.’ Even in a horror film, a character must evolve and learn. So this couple starts out hating each other, but by working together to escape psychos, they rekindle their love. Beckinsale learns to cry, Wilson holds her like he did in the old days, bells will ring and birds will chirp. What tripe.

Today’s horror films demand an awful lot of suspension of disbelief. To see if it’s working, I use the audience.

With Vacancy, it was pretty plain they were buying it. They paid to see a run of the mill horror movie, and that’s what they got. The only true groan of disbelief came towards the end. They were right. It was as derivative as it could get, but by then they’d had their fun.

As for me, I was left with those same old words on my lips: “It could have been so much more…”